The newspaper house where I spent part of my mainstream journalism years stands majestic along Pretoria’s Vermeulen Street, not far from the new High Court.
I use the word “new” deliberately, because in the good old days the Supreme Court was on Church Square, next to the old Reserve Bank.
The Pretoria News building is where many of us learned the trade.
Up until this day the building sublets space to other newspapers’ bureaus such as the Sunday Times, Business Day, Sowetan, Daily Sun and Financial Mail.
Now I have previously written, in this very newspaper, about Mpho Kobue at the time that he was at the Pretoria bureau of the Sunday Times.
To remind you, I wrote about how during my time at the Pretoria News I had to rush to Mamelodi at the height of political unrest.
I was in the company of the young Afrikaner photographer, Julani van der Westhuizen.
Julani insisted on driving the company pool car because — in her own words — she was the only white woman who knew the streets of Mamelodi, Soshanguve or Atteridgeville like the proverbial back of her hand.
In Mamelodi the two of us were confronted by a mob of comrades, who cried blue murder, calling me Mpho Kobue of the Sunday Times.
Fortunately for me and Julani, one senior comrade recognised my real identity and we lived to see another day.
When I returned to the office and took the lift to the fifth floor to ask Mpho Kobue what was the problem between him and the comrades, he laughed until there were tears in his eyes.
Just last week a friend in the Pretoria township of Mabopane called to say Mpho Kobue was no more.
May his soul rest in peace.
Memories of Mpho are also those of the trainee reporter at the Pretoria News, Seipati Sentle.
The late editor Deon du Plessis had stormed out of his office to assign Seipati to the township of Atteridgeville, where hell broke loose between the comrades and the police.
Tearfully, Seipati responded that she was afraid to be caught up in the crossfire.
All Du Plessis could do was remind Seipati: “My friend, you are in the wrong job.”
The editor then winked at me to grab a photographer and head for Atteridgeville, where indeed there were endless running battles between the police and militant members of the Congress of South African Students.
— The BEAT
